


And the stars, too

by ravenbringslight



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Loki (Marvel), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Character Death Fix, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Erotic Electrostimulation, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Service top thor, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, and fixes things the right way, thor wields the gauntlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-02-10 17:26:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenbringslight/pseuds/ravenbringslight
Summary: Thor uses the gauntlet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's [some beautiful art here](https://twitter.com/moopzies/status/1139015519913119745) by moopz that has a spoiler for the last chapter <3

Thor is a little drunk, but not nearly as drunk as he’d like to be. He can still form coherent thoughts, for one thing, and when he can do that they seem to consist entirely of how much of a failure he is, and how desperately lonely he feels, and how he wishes that he had just been incinerated in that neutron star and been done with it.

Fortunately, though, he has something else to think about at the moment, which is how _fucking stupid_ all the mortals are being.

“The Power Stone is on Morag in 2014,” Nebula is saying, “and the Soul Stone on Vormir—”

“—and Thor can go to Asgard and get the Reality Stone while it’s there—”

“—and if we go to New York on the right date we can grab the other three—”

“Don’t waste your precious Pym particles on all those trips,” Thor says. He’s slumped in a chair in the corner behind his sunglasses, and from the way everyone turns to look at him they’d forgotten that he was even there. “Why collect the Stones ourselves when they were already collected for us?”

He can see the realization in Natasha’s eyes before everyone else’s.

“The Garden,” Natasha says.

Thor nods. “Five years and two days ago. Before Thanos destroyed them. We already caught him by surprise there once. Let’s do it again.”

“That means he’d have a whole working gauntlet, though,” Rhodey says, crossing his arms and frowning. “It’s too dangerous.”

“And time traveling to four different locations and hoping for the best isn’t?” Thor says. “Your plan has too many moving parts. Too many points of failure.”

“He has a point,” Natasha says.

“He’s drunk,” Rocket says, narrowing his eyes.

“I’m drunk, not an idiot,” Thor says. He fights the urge to scowl like a child. “And I have about ten centuries more tactical experience than any of you. I’ve had more plans fail than you’ve had hours in your life, and even more than that succeed. We’ll attack while he’s sleeping, I’ll go for his head, _again_ , and then we can take the gauntlet and come back here and fix everything.”

Steve has been frowning the entire time and worrying at his lip, and he finally speaks up. “We don’t have Carol this time.”

“We can bring Valkyrie,” Thor says.

“Thor, buddy, she’s strong, but—”

“She can stand toe to toe with me,” Banner says. “And that’s saying something. I think I’m with Thor on this one. We need to reduce our variables here.”

“I just need—” Thor stops talking to yawn. “I just need to sleep this off a little first.”

“We don’t have time for that,” Stark snaps.

Thor lowers his sunglasses and gives him a withering glare. “I thought you were the smart one, Stark. We have a _time machine_.”

Scott Lang smothers a giggle. Thor likes him. He reminds him of himself in better days, when he was still optimistic and could laugh at the ridiculousness of life. How ironic that the man calls himself “Ant Man” when, really, all of these mortals have the lifespan of ants. Thor used to find it endearing, how they could fit so much life and passion into such a short speck of time, but now he just finds it depressing. What’s the point of any of it? And for that matter, what’s the point of living as long as an Asgardian when there’s nothing left to live for?

“I don’t know if I like this—” Stark starts.

Thor stands, jaw clenched, and pushes his sunglasses up on top of his head. The sharp tang of ozone fills the air as he calls Stormbreaker to his outstretched hand and wreaths himself in lightning. Every electronic around them flares and beeps in alarm. The lightning spills from his eyes and turns his world into a blaze of white heat, and he shifts his aura to fill the room. He is the promise of the storm to come. He is larger than life. He is a _god_. To their credit, the mortals don’t tremble—they’re Avengers, and trembling is not in their nature—but he sees the moment that realization sinks into their bones. There is a reason that he is enshrined in myth many worlds over. He’d almost forgotten it himself, but it feels good to remember.

Thor’s voice is low and menacing. “Thanos killed my people. He killed my friends. He killed my _brother_.” Though all of it hurts, the last wound is the deepest, and the one Thor fears he’ll never recover from. “I’ll take his damned head from his shoulders myself as many times as the Fates will let me.

“We’re going to the Garden.”

*

Post-snap Thanos is a pitiful creature. He was pitiful the first time Thor killed him, and he’s pitiful now. They catch him sleeping. Val and Banner pin him to the bed. His hand comes up to snap, but before he can finish the motion Thor swings his axe and parts his head from his body as easy as a prayer.

It should feel more satisfying than it does. 

The head rolls towards Rocket, who steps aside with a noise of disgust. Nebula crouches down to look it in the eye. Her face remains as unchanging as always. Stark goes to pull the gauntlet from Thanos’s still-twitching hand, but Thor shoulders past him to get there first.

He hates being in this place. It’s here where his last shred of hope died five years ago. He’s too jaded to rekindle any of that hope now, despite the fact that they’ve just won the Stones. It simply doesn’t feel real. This all happened before, and as far as his brain is concerned it’s all happening again—only this time he’s fatter and sadder, which, on the whole, might make things feel even worse. 

“This was too easy,” Stark says.

Thor hefts the gauntlet and turns to him. “What about any of the last five years has been easy?”

Stark frowns. “I still don’t like it.”

Thor looks down at the gauntlet gleaming in his hands. He can feel it warping the fabric of reality around them. This much power should never be able to exist in one place. Privately, he thinks that Thanos was right to destroy the Stones, and hates that he’s ever agreed with that monster about anything.

“Not every battle is glorious, Stark.”

They leave the corpse behind them and travel back to their own present. Thor thinks that he could travel to each moment that Thanos had ever been alive and kill him each time, leave a stack of bodies fathoms deep as a monument to his despair, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Not for him, and not for all the others who Thanos had harmed. He clutches the gauntlet tighter in his hand. Feels it thrumming.

He wishes he was drunk. He hasn’t faced this pain sober in five years, and he doesn’t want to be doing it right now either.

The Avengers compound is such a bright white inside that Thor finds himself squinting. He lets Stark take the gauntlet from him and put it on one of his devices to be analyzed.

“So who’s going to do it?” Rhodey asks, ever the pragmatist.

“I’ll do it,” Stark says, and is immediately drowned out by a chorus of “No”s.

“I should do it,” Banner says quietly. “It’s mostly gamma radiation. I’ll probably be ok.”

“The last five years stays,” Stark says, his voice hard. Everyone stops staring at the gauntlet to stare at him instead. “I can’t lose everything I’ve gained. I can’t.”

“Alright,” Banner agrees, “the last five years stays.” He reaches for the Stones, but Thor’s hand on his arm stops him.

“Wait,” Thor says. “What about the people who died in accidents right afterwards? Or from disease and despair in the aftermath? What about them?” _Or the people who died right before?_ He hears a neck snap in his memory, and he has to force breath into his lungs.

“We’ll bring them back too, then,” Banner says.

“You’ll overwhelm the universe,” Thor says roughly. “Do you really think your planet can handle its population more than doubling in an instant with the way things are now? Or any other civilized planet for that matter?”

Norns, the mortals intend well, but sometimes they’re so incredibly dense that Thor wants to scream or cry or both.

“Give me the gauntlet,” Thor says. “I’ll do it properly.”

“But the gamma radiation…” Banner says, trailing off uncertainly.

Thor laughs, though it’s without humor. “Do you know how I made Stormbreaker?” he asks. “It was at the same star forge that made Mjolnir. And do you know why it’s called a ‘star forge’? Because it channels the entire thermal and electromagnetic radiation output of a dying neutron star. When I got there the forge was broken, and so I channeled the star through myself instead.”

Stark and Banner are looking at him aghast and Thor smiles tightly. “I barely got singed.” He holds his hand out. “Give me the gauntlet.”

He looks each of them in the eye in turn. His old friends—Stark, Rogers, Banner, Natasha, Barton. Valkyrie. They meet his gaze with silent nods and tensed jaws. The newer faces are harder to read—Rocket, Nebula, Rhodey, Scott Lang—but it doesn’t much matter. Thor is doing this.

He doesn’t have hope. Hope is too dangerous right now. But he has an overdeveloped sense of duty and a desperate desire to set things right, and that will have to be good enough.

The universe is counting on him. He will not let it down again.

“It still might kill you,” Rocket says.

Thor smiles grimly. _Would that be such a terrible thing?_ “Only if I die.”

*

Thor is coming apart.

For a time that’s the only thought he can latch onto. His molecules are disassembling into atoms, his atoms into quarks, and all of them are expanding to take up the entirety of existence. He is becoming the universe, or maybe the universe is becoming him. Maybe they’re the same thing. He breathes in stardust and exhales stars.

The fabric of spacetime ripples before him. If he wanted to, he could reach out and touch it. He does. It flows through his fingers like grains of sand, like waves at the shore, offering up its secrets. _Oh,_ Thor thinks. It’s all so simple, from here.

He can see exactly what Thanos did, and exactly how to undo it. But it’s not enough. More needs to be set right.

From very far away, Thor can hear screaming. His friends. He brings the consciousness of the cosmos to bear on the Avengers compound and sees his own body fraying. It is no matter. He might be dead in an instant, but an instant is all he needs. Time does as he wills, now. He has forever. He turns his will back outward, into the vast.

The universe aches at the wound that it’s been dealt. Thor aches with it. It is a living creature, Thor sees that now. It always has been. The idea of individuality is incomprehensible at this scale—they are all of them cells in an organism, living and dying without ever seeing the whole for its parts. The cosmos isn’t just stars and planets, it’s blood and sinew and grief and love and tragedy and splendor all at once, both supernova bright and as dark as an event horizon. It’s a great tree, and a spinning disc, and a tiny pinpoint in the great nothingness, and it is none of those things. It is a story, and it is writing itself.

For this neverending moment, Thor holds the pen.

He starts with the plants and insects and animals that were lost. The microscopic organisms. Brings them all back. Doubles the song of life. Hears it reverberate through the stars, and hears the stars sing back in glad harmony.

Next, Thor turns his will towards those intelligent lifeforms who died in the snap. The ones who might not want to come back to a world that’s been so irrevocably changed. He shows them the world they would be coming back to. The loved ones who have moved on, and those who haven’t. The chaos.

 _Choose_ , Thor says. _I will not bring you back if you don’t wish it._

He does the same for everyone who died in the battle leading up to the snap and in the five years since. Earth wasn’t the only place where the snap caused widespread havoc leading to even more death and destruction—cars crashing, planes falling from the sky—and then, afterwards, looting and disease and starvation. Suicides. The story is the same everywhere. Thor rewrites it.

 _Choose_ , he says again.

Many choose to return. Some do not. For those who do, Thor makes sure they have a place. Makes sure they’ll come back not where they died, but where their loved ones are, or where they want to be. Makes sure there is enough food and water and shelter to support them.

Satisfied that he’s done all he can, Thor turns his will towards Valhalla. He has a selfish desire that he cannot feel guilty about.

There is one soul there, bright as a star, and Thor’s soul speaks to it through the lens of the universe.

 _Mother_ , Thor says.

If he had eyes, he would cry.

Thor has no arms to embrace her, but Frigga’s soul pulses with a wave of unconditional love that ripples through the very weave of the cosmos.

“Thor,” she says, and her whole essence is smiling. “My darling.”

They talk for a very long time, or what would be a very long time if such a thing as time existed. Thor has missed her so, so much. He tells her everything that has happened since that wretched day that Thor brought Jane to Asgard. In retrospect, doing that was just one of the first of Thor’s many, many mistakes that led to the hopeless well he finds himself at the bottom of now. He pours out his fears and insecurities, his devastation. His mother’s heart absorbs it all, and she she offers him back all the empathy and understanding he’s been missing for many long years. It makes his burden feel a little lighter.

 _I’ve failed at everything,_ Thor says finally. _Although, I think perhaps I will not fail at this._

“We all fail,” Frigga says gently. “Although not all of us are quite so mighty, and so our failures are not quite so large. And, I think, not all of us have hearts as big as you do, and so you feel every cut twice as deep. But darling, we _do_ all fail. Over and over. But we keep trying. Life might not turn out the way we want it to, but it still goes on. You still go on.”

 _Everything I was supposed to do_ , Thor says. _Everything I was supposed to be—_

“Don’t worry about what you’re _supposed_ to be. Worry about what you _want_ to be. What do you want to be, Thor?”

Thor sighs, matter gently rearranging itself to sigh with him.

 _Happy_ , he says finally. _But I don’t know how_.

Frigga’s essence pulses with wordless love again, permeating Thor’s soul, soothing his jagged edges.

 _I miss you_ , he says. _You could come back too, if you want—_

“No,” Frigga says. “My thread was always meant to be cut when it was. I belong here now. I’m so sorry, my love.”

Acceptance sinks into Thor’s heart, heavy as a stone. He’d known it would be so.

 _Is…_ Thor finds it hard to continue. _Is Loki here?_

Frigga’s soul is a smile again. “Yes.”

_Is he happy?_

Frigga is quiet for a moment. “He misses his brother.”

The words cut Thor twice over. First, that Loki is denied happiness even in death. Second, the reason for it. Thor knows that if their places were reversed, he would feel the same. Would never be truly happy until his brother joined him, wherever he was.

_Could I..._

Astute as ever, Frigga sends him wordless comfort and finishes his thought for him. “Ragnarok was ever meant to be,” she says, “but Thanos was not. He was a flaw in the tapestry—a pulled thread, warping everything around it. I think it would not be amiss to set to rights the imbalance he caused when he attacked your ship. Those he killed are here now, and most of them would rather be where you are.” She pauses, then says purposefully, “Your brother, I think, included.”

For the first time since Thor heard Loki’s neck snap, he feels a spark of hope. He is here, now. He is the master of the Stones. He can’t take away his own demons, but maybe, just maybe, he won’t have to face them alone. Maybe Loki wants to come back. Maybe he wants to be at Thor’s side the way that Thor desperately wants to be at his. The spark of hope in his chest catches fire. He’s burning from the inside out. Suddenly the idea of giving Loki the option of returning is terrifying. What if he says no? Thor will surely flame to ash.

 _I love you_ , Thor tells Frigga. He says it and he thinks it and he feels it, and the cosmos projects it, so thoroughly that there can be no doubt. _I will see you again._

Frigga is once again a smile. “I know. But not for a very long time. I love you, too, my dear, darling boy. Take care of yourself. And your brother.”

_If he wants to come back with me._

Frigga flares into blinding incandescence, becomes a tinkling laugh.

“Go,” she says.

It’s hard to tear himself away, but Thor does. He finds the souls of everyone who died on the Ark save two, and lets them know they can return if they want. They all do. Thor knows that New Asgard will be beside itself with joy. He is still burning inside.

The first of the remaining two souls regards Thor with eyes that are golden and all-seeing even here.

“My King,” Heimdall says.

 _My friend_ , Thor says. _Will you return with me? I have been lost without your counsel._

“You have been lost without my propensity to commit treason for you,” Heimdall says warmly. “Although now that you are King, I suppose I can only commit treason against you. Yes, I will return with you.”

Thor feels lighter. The millennia that he has left will not be quite so lonely.

 _Thank you_ , Thor says, and wills it so.

There is one left.

This soul is a quicksilver thing, flashing like a fish in a stream, darting through secret ways. But Thor is the cosmos and there is nowhere to hide from him, and so he catches it in the cosmic bowl of his hands.

 _Brother_.

Loki shivers in his grasp.

_Why do you run from me?_

“You came for me last,” Loki says. His voice is full of despair. “I thought you were angry with me.”

His brother has ever been a puzzling thing. 

_Why would I be angry with you?_

“For all the ways I’ve failed you.”

_The only thing I’m angry about is the thought I might have to face this world again without you._

Loki radiates confusion and heartache and yearning. Thor can feel it curling off of him in licking tendrils. His silver tongue is silent. Thor’s own yearning is threatening to consume him. He’s been drunk and numb for so long that it makes this pain hurt all the more, and he wants to cry out with the force of it. Instead, he asks a question.

_Are you happy here?_

Loki’s answer ghosts out of him as insubstantial as down. “How can I be?”

Thor is the universe and the universe is Thor, and all of it loves Loki, helplessly. Surely Loki can feel it. Surely Loki knows.

_Would you like to come and try to be happy with me?_

Loki’s soul flares bright. “Thor,” he says, “you’re so...there’s so much of you...how...there’s so little of me…”

 _No,_ Thor says, _no, it’s just me. Just us. Come back with me. Come home. Please. Brother._

If Loki doesn’t say yes, Thor will simply let his body fray to pieces on Earth, and join Loki here. He’s realized that he just wants to be wherever his brother is, whether it’s back in the living world, here in Valhalla, or in dimensions yet unknown.

“Brother,” Loki says, like the word means something new. His soul shimmers. He is the embodiment of a question.

 _Will you come?_ Thor asks. _With me?_

Loki’s answer, when it comes, makes the cosmos shudder and rock on its axis.

“Yes.”

Thor wills it so, and lets go, and falls.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> using the gauntlet comes with a price

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm absolutely blown away by the response to the first chapter, thank you SO much everyone who read and kudos'ed and commented, it really means a lot to me. 😭❤️

Loki comes to all at once and bolts upright, gasping. For a moment all he can see is white, and he thinks his vision is gone, but then his eyes focus and he realizes it’s just the place he’s in; a vast white room of metal and plastic and…

Screaming.

People are rushing past him, their voices a hysterical counterpoint to the shrill wail of alarms. The smell of burnt flesh fills the air.

“Someone hold him down!”

“Get that thing off him!”

“Fuck, it’s so loud...FRIDAY, cut the alarms!”

“Jesus. What the hell is _he_ doing here?”

Suddenly there’s a red metal hand on his arm. Loki wrenches himself free and staggers upright, only to find the business end of a laser pointed at his face. It's attached to an arm and the arm is attached to a very armored Tony Stark.

“Where is he?” Loki croaks.

Stark’s voice sounds tinny through his helmet. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, Reindeer Games—”

“ _Where is he?_ ” Loki snarls. He grabs Stark’s arm and tosses him bodily aside. His eyes are already darting around the room, scanning for the one person he cares about. He’s breathing heavily, and it hurts; having to breathe again at all is a bit of a shock, and the oxygen in this atmosphere feels corrosive as it saws through his lungs.

There’s a knot of people clustered around a figure collapsed on the floor.

Loki is there in two strides, shoving people out of the way, kneeling swiftly, hoping he’s not too late.

“Get him!” he hears Stark’s voice implore from across the room. Someone tries to tackle Loki from behind, but Loki bats them away and sends them flying into the wall so hard it dents.

Thor is lying on the ground, convulsing. His left arm is a black smoking mess. The metal of the gauntlet has melted into his flesh, and it’s a twisted lump of bone and metal and shreds of charred skin. His eyes have rolled so far back in his head that Loki can only see the whites.

He’s dying.

“Stop,” Loki hears someone say. It sounds like Bruce and also doesn’t. “He’s not trying to hurt Thor, he’s trying to help him.”

“That’s _Loki_ —”

“Yeah, he and Thor, kind of, uh, made up. He kind of, um…”

Loki stops paying attention. _’Kind of made up’_ , he thinks. _That’s one way to put it_. Frantically, he runs his hands over his brother’s body trying to assess the damage. Thor is slipping away beneath him. Before Loki can even call upon his seidr, Thor draws in one last deep shuddering breath and then goes limp. 

"No no no no no," Loki breathes over and over. He is not going to let this happen.

Hands shaking, he turns Thor’s left arm over. The metal of the gauntlet is ruined, but the Stones still sit in it, shining and untouched and perfect. Loki pries the orange one out. It burns his hand, but he clutches it tightly and slams his fist down on Thor’s chest.

 _Come back_ , Loki orders viciously. He sends all of his will and seidr and desperation surging through the stone. Thor’s soul is already winging away, but Loki catches it. It’s like plucking a bird from the sky in mid flight, and Thor’s soul fights him at first; buffets him with its wings, scratches him with its talons; but Loki holds on with stubborn determination and then gently, oh so gently, guides it back to Thor’s body.

It settles into Thor’s chest and his entire body bows up off the ground, his eyes flying open.

With a gut-curdling cry, Thor begins tearing at his left arm.

“Oh my god,” Thor moans, “get it off, get it off—”

Loki starts tugging at the gauntlet and Thor screams.

“The whole thing,” Thor says, agony in his voice.

“What do you mean?” Loki asks. He dreads the answer.

“The whole...arm...please...Loki…”

Their eyes meet for a brief intense second, and Loki nods. He can hear the mortals yelling at each other behind him, and Bruce and someone who sounds like the Valkyrie trying to calm them down, and a distant part of Loki’s mind makes a note to thank them later. Fighting off a pack of angry mortals would take up precious time that Thor can ill afford right now.

Loki draws a long knife from interdimensional space. It’s hard to hold it; his hand is more badly burned than he thought. Thor squeezes his eyes shut and turns his face away.

“Thor,” Loki says shakily. “Are you sure?”

“Please,” Thor grits out. He’s fisting his right hand in his hair so tightly that his knuckles are white. “I can’t bear it. It’s unmaking me.”

Before he can think better of it, Loki brings the knife up and down in a swift brutal arc. Thor screams again, and rolls away, and the twisted blackened remains of his arm stay behind on the floor. Loki can’t stop staring at it.

“What the fuck!” he hears Barton yell behind him, and it perfectly encapsulates his own feelings. Five minutes ago he was dead, and now he isn’t, and he’s just separated Thor’s arm from his body.

“I’ve just saved his life,” Loki says out loud to no one in particular. “Although I don’t suppose I’ll get any thanks for it.”

A whimper from Thor snaps Loki out of his temporary paralysis, and he crawls over to him one-handed. He runs his good hand over Thor’s side, probing him with his seidr. The wound left by the Stones is like nothing he’s ever felt before. There’s an emptiness there. A lack. Like something has been erased. 

“Brother,” Thor gasps. Loki finds himself stroking Thor’s bearded cheek. Thor’s eyes find his and lock him in place. The natural one is as deep and blue as the ocean, and they both hold so much pain that Loki wants to weep. “Help me,” Thor pleads.

“We need to get him to the medical wing _now_ ,” one of the mortals is insisting, and “Yeah, ok,” Bruce says, and Loki finally turns around to give them all the most withering stare he can muster.

“You idiots,” he growls. He reaches for the gauntlet again and pries the red stone out this time. It doesn’t burn quite as badly, or maybe he’s just numb by now. He stares at it for half a moment. His mother had traded her life for this miserable rock and the candle-flame life of the mortal who housed it. Why does the trade only work in one direction? He wants to destroy it utterly. He wants Frigga back. 

Instead, he directs his will through it and bends reality to suit his purposes.

A gleaming blob of liquid uru materializes in the air in front of him. Loki concentrates and it begins to flow and elongate, begins to take a recognizable shape. An arm. It floats over to Thor and attaches itself to his body. Loki is starting to reel, but he stubbornly ignores it. He’s not done yet. He knits the metal to the stump of Thor’s arm until they become one, until the new arm is as much a part of Thor’s body as the old one was. It’s difficult. The Stones are what caused the wound, and it resists the Reality Stone’s attempt to alter it. The curious emptiness that Loki felt before drinks up nearly everything that Loki feeds it, and so he pours in more—the power of the stone and also his own personal seidr. His vision begins to go dark around the edges.

He manages it though, and when he’s done, the stone falls from his nerveless fingers and Loki tips over and falls into a senseless pile next to his brother. Their good hands find each other and squeeze, briefly. Someone leans over them, a dark shape against the white of the ceiling, and Loki could swear they have golden eyes. Then, overcome with the stress of existing again, and nearly losing Thor, and badly overextending himself, Loki passes out.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this is a good look for thor I'm sorry I don't make the rules](https://i.annihil.us/u/prod/marvel/i/mg/f/20/583defbd3a23c/background.jpg)


	3. Chapter 3

Loki coughs himself awake and into a throbbing headache. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands when the Valkyrie comes in a moment later.

“How did you know I was awake?”

“We have your room under surveillance.”

“Ah.” He’s quiet for a breath, and then, “Thor?” he asks.

“Next door.”

“Can we…?”

“C’mon,” the Valkyrie says, and helps him to his feet.

The room they’re in has a bed and a table and a window, and a plethora of barbaric Midgardian medical devices. At least that’s what Loki assumes they are. His collar is loose and there’s some kind of monitor wiring that runs from his chest to an electrical box. It beeps accusingly when he rips it off of him, which makes his head throb even more, and with an irritable huff he fries the box with seidr.

Thor’s room is an exact duplicate of Loki’s. Thor is in the bed with his eyes closed, though whether he’s asleep or unconscious Loki doesn’t know; he’s hooked up to the same sort of machine that Loki had been. Heimdall is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

“Let me guess,” Loki says, “you saw me coming.”

“I usually do.”

Loki goes to Thor’s bedside and finally gets a proper look at him. He’s as beautiful as ever, though his hair and beard are long and wild and unkempt, and he’s let his muscles go to fat.

“What have you all done to him?” Loki says softly.

“We haven’t done anything—” the Valkyrie starts.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Loki says. He turns to look at her and he can’t keep the venom out of his voice. He’s suddenly furious. He knows his brother, knows just how he carries his pain, and he hasn’t seen Thor like this in centuries. The last time was when they were just barely men, and Thor still green in the field, and he’d led his company into an ambush and gotten them all killed. Thor had tried to drink himself stupid for two years afterwards, and stopped training completely; Loki knows he never even touched Mjolnir in all that time because he’d been too afraid she wouldn’t answer him. He’d looked then as he looks now. It breaks Loki’s heart to see him like this.

“Has no one been caring for him at all?” Loki snaps. He doesn’t wait for a response, only turns back around to look down at his brother’s face. “You shouldn’t have separated us.”

The Valkyrie huffs. “We almost couldn’t. It took me and Heimdall together to pry you apart.”

 _Good_ , Loki thinks.

“And who are you to blame me?” she says. “You weren’t even here.”

Loki’s face twists at that. She’s right. He hadn’t been there. He’d let Thor down again, just like he always does.

“I’m here now,” he says shortly. His right palm is bandaged, but he lets his fingertips skim over the back of Thor’s hand. Remembers catching a bottle stopper with similar words upon his lips, and the few happy weeks they’d had before everything had come crashing down. Thor had asked him, in Valhalla, if Loki would come try to be happy with him again.

He wonders if maybe, after all this time, they might finally learn the knack of it.

Heimdall has been silently watching them. What he sees, Loki can only guess.

“You should tell us everything that happened,” Heimdall says to the Valkyrie. “How long were we gone?”

She sighs. “Five years. Let’s get some chairs. This is going to be a long story.”

*

Loki is ready to stab everyone by the end of it, himself included, for all of their roles in Thanos’s success. It had all been a series of missteps that had added up to something catastrophic. As the Valkyrie talks he keeps glancing to Thor, still unconscious in his sterile white bed, and imagining how he must have felt. He knows that Thor has always taken on more responsibility than he should, and that the near simultaneous blows of losing his family, planet, and people, and then failing to be the one to strike Thanos dead must have nearly killed him.

And he’s been alone to deal with it.

For five years, he’s been alone.

There has been no one here on Midgard who has loved him in anything approximating a sufficient fashion, and Loki regards anyone who doesn’t love Thor unreservedly as worthless at best.

When the Valkyrie is done talking, Loki rises and smooths out his tunic.

“Let’s take him home,” he says tartly. “The mortals have proved themselves no friends of his. They deserve no more of his time.”

“We should at least tell them we’re leaving,” the Valkyrie says, but Loki is already taking up Thor’s ridiculous new axe and testing its heft.

“Feel free,” he says. “I’m sure they can send you back to New Asgard on one of their flying contraptions. I’m going now. Heimdall, are you with me?”

Heimdall rises as well.

“I should like to see this New Asgard,” he says.

The Valkyrie rolls her eyes and huffs, but she comes over to stand with them.

“We’re going to get an earful from Stark,” she says.

Loki makes a noncommittal noise and yanks all the monitor wires off of Thor.

“Help me lift him.”

The last thing Loki sees is Captain Rogers’s confused face as he rushes into the room. Loki waves at him as the Bifrost carries them away.

*

Thor’s home is a stinking cesspit. Loki chases Korg and Miek out and arranges Thor on the sofa while he tends to the bed; the bedding clearly hasn’t been washed in months, and he’d no sooner tuck Thor into it than he would lick the bottom of his boot. He tears everything off the mattress and incinerates it with one word of power, and then finds clean sheets and blankets in a chest at the foot of the bed. They stink like the house does, and he uses his seidr again to clean them and make them smell like summer rain.

Once he has Thor safely in the bed, Loki goes out to survey the rest of the house.

Heimdall is sitting gingerly on the edge of the sofa, looking more exhausted than Loki has ever seen him, and the Valkyrie is standing in the kitchen staring out the window.

“How did you let him get like this,” Loki says flatly, his voice shaking with the effort of not yelling. “Look at this place, it’s disgusting—”

“I didn’t ‘let’ him do anything,” the Valkyrie says. “You know how stubborn he is. _He_ wouldn’t let _me_ do a damned thing other than keep his beer supply from running out. I tried. You have to know I did. I know what he’s been going through better than anyone alive—”

“Well you didn’t try hard enough,” Loki snaps. His headache has lessened, but it’s still there lurking in his temples.

The Valkyrie turns to him, and her eyes spark fire. “Look,” she says. “You’ve had a tough day. We all have. But I have to go now, and deal with our population suddenly doubling. You should stay and be here when he wakes up.”

Loki squeezes his eyes shut and rubs at them. He feels as exhausted as Heimdall looks, and he has a pit in his stomach at the thought of Thor waking up and seeing what’s become of his arm. What Loki has done to him. Doesn’t know what Thor will expect of him. What he’s supposed to do, or be.

“Hey,” the Valkyrie, and squeezes his shoulder. “Don’t look so nervous. These past five years, there were two names we weren’t allowed to say around here. Thanos...and you. He wants to see you.”

Loki looks at her. They’d gotten off to a rocky start, the two of them, then as well as now. But they’d come to a peaceful arrangement on the Ark, and she’s offering him an olive branch now.

“Thank you,” he says. He sighs and looks down. “And thank you for keeping the humans off of me before.”

She gives his shoulder another squeeze.

“C'mon,” she says to Heimdall. “Let’s find you a bed and leave these two to it.”

*

Loki knows he should probably sleep. Being alive again is still taxing.

Instead, he starts cleaning Thor’s house.

His brother had never been an organized person, but the state of his quarters is absolutely unconscionable. There’s garbage everywhere, empty food containers, dirty dishes, smelly laundry. The couch should probably be burned. The rug as well. The bathroom looks like no one has cleaned it the entire time Thor has been living here. Every corner of the ceiling has wispy cobwebs clinging to it.

Loki is in the kitchen trying to magic crusted on food off of a stack of plates when he feels a presence at his back. His hands still, and he slowly puts down the plate he’d been holding.

“I didn’t even know you knew how to do dishes,” Thor’s voice rumbles behind him.

Loki turns around. Thor’s wearing those ridiculous pyjama pants, and slippers, and an ugly Midgardian shirt that doesn’t suit him at all. The left sleeve is gone, courtesy of Loki’s dagger, and Thor’s new metal arm gleams. His hair is an absolute disaster, his beard as well; he has two differently-colored eyes; his belly is round and soft. He’s barely recognizable. And still Loki would know him anywhere; even if all he had to go on was a finger, Loki would know him.

“Apparently neither do you,” Loki says.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Well, if I’m going to be living here—”

Thor is across the kitchen before Loki can finish speaking, and he’s wrapping him up in the biggest, tightest hug Loki’s ever gotten. Loki hugs him back, fiercely. Thor’s shoulders are shaking, and he realizes that Thor is weeping into his neck, which makes him blink back tears of his own.

“You’re back,” Thor is saying, “you’re really back.”

“I’m really back,” Loki says. He clutches at the back of Thor’s head and lets a few tears fall down his own cheeks.

“You’ll stay here? With me?” Thor asks the skin of his neck.

Loki pulls back a bit and smooths Thor’s hair back from his face. His eyes are so sad and hopeful and open, and his beard is wet with tears, and Loki loves him so much he would rip the earth in two rather than leave him again.

“Yes,” Loki says. He kisses Thor’s forehead, a soft wet press of lips that he lets linger for a moment too long. “Yes.” Then, “Come on, let’s get you a bath.”


	4. Chapter 4

Thor leans against the sink with his arms folded across his chest and watches Loki draw a bath. “I can bathe myself,” he says.

“Really?” Loki says, arching a skeptical eyebrow. “I see no indication of that.”

Thor makes no effort to hide his smile.

“Your hair and beard obviously need more help than you can give them,” Loki says. “Come, the water’s ready.”

Thor pulls his shirt over his head and shucks his pants down. He doesn’t miss the way Loki’s eyes linger on his torso. He knows he looks different than he used to.

“Can this get wet?” Thor asks, touching his new arm.

“It’s your arm,” Loki says. “It can do anything your other arm can do.”

Thor hums and steps into the tub.

Everything feels like a dream. It all seems equally implausible; his life before the gauntlet, his time wielding it, this here and now. Like all of it happened to different Thors, and none of them are him. He puts his head on his knees. The hot sudsy water cuts him off at the calf and thigh and navel, like he’s half a person.

He sighs when Loki’s hands start working their way through his hair. Back when Thor’s hair had grown long enough to start getting in his way, he’d spun it into little twists with his seidr and then just left them alone. They’re long and matted now. Loki murmurs a spell to himself over and over and coaxes each one out with his fingers.

“How long has it been since we both had long hair?” Loki says.

It’s so gentle and tender and familiar, and Thor realizes he’s crying again. He’d smothered poor Loki with his sobs earlier, but there’s no sobbing now. His shoulders are still. There are just tears leaking from his eyes to run warm onto his knees. Loki undoes the last twist and then combs his fingers through Thor’s hair. Gathers it back and holds all of it in one hand and twists the whole thing, then flips it up and wraps it around itself, exposing the back of Thor’s neck. His thumbs dig into the meat of Thor’s shoulders and he kneads at the tight muscles running from there to the base of his skull.

Thor has always loved Loki’s hands. They’re slim and dry and cool, long-fingered, deft and elegant whether they’re stained with ink, gripping a dagger, writing spells into the air, or simply being chewed at while Loki concentrates. Seized with a sudden impulse, Thor reaches back and takes one of Loki’s hands in his own and tugs on it. Loki lets him do it without resistance, and Thor lays a long kiss on Loki’s palm and then presses it to his own cheek for a moment before letting go.

Thor feels Loki’s indrawn breath behind him, and then Loki’s forehead is resting on the back of his neck and Loki is gripping his shoulders, and Thor covers Loki’s hands with his own. They sit like that for a moment. Loki gives him a parting squeeze and then finger combs his hair back out of the bun he’d twisted it into.

“It’s ready for you to wash it,” Loki says.

The water sloshes as Thor sinks down into it to wet his head. His face goes under completely, and he opens his eyes. The world is rippling and refracted. The light from the window, the dark of the ceiling—Loki’s face hanging over him, light and dark both. Thor is gripped with a sudden fear that Loki isn’t actually real, and he sits up quickly, sputtering as water runs down into his eyes and mouth. Loki is handing him a small towel for his face, and Thor takes it and pulls Loki with it. Feels him warm and solid under his hands. He’s pulled Loki off balance and Loki grips the edge of the tub to keep from falling in. Thor cups the back of his neck and rocks their foreheads together.

“Hey,” Loki murmurs. “Are you ok?”

Thor shakes his head _no_ against Loki’s. He isn’t ok. Hasn’t been in a long time. Doesn’t know when he will be again, if ever.

Loki kisses his forehead like he’d done in the kitchen, and then each cheek, and Thor lifts his eyes to look Loki full in the face. It hits him all in a rush. That Loki had died, for real; that if Thor hadn’t literally had the ability to unmake reality, Loki would still be dead; that it could happen again at any moment; that wasting even a second more of the time they have together is a monumental crime.

Loki gasps into his mouth when Thor kisses him.

“Oh,” Loki breathes when they pull away from each other. His cheeks are flushed and the corner of his mouth looks unsteady. “Are we allowed to do that now?”

Thor smiles. It feels like the first real smile he’s had in years. Maybe it is. Loki smiles back, his eyes shiny. His is a real smile too, the one with teeth that he doesn’t like to show other people. It fills Thor with happiness that he was able to make his brother happy, and Thor kisses him again, then the corner of his mouth, and his cheek, and presses their faces together, and Loki nuzzles his temple into Thor’s.

“You still have to wash your hair,” Loki whispers into Thor’s damp ear. “And your beard.”

“Help me do it,” Thor says.

Loki lathers him up, his long fingers working firmly into Thor’s scalp and jaw, and Thor rinses himself off. He scrubs at his underarms while he’s at it, and his groin, and between his cheeks.

Afterwards, he wraps a towel around himself and sits on the floor between Loki’s knees. He closes his eyes and tips his face up and lets Loki work his magic. Loki strokes his beard, his fingertips glowing green, and with each pass it grows shorter, until it hugs Thor’s face. Loki nudges him until he turns around and gives him his back, and then combs his hair out.

“Do you want me to braid it?”

“Leave it down,” Thor says.

It’s late afternoon, and the lowering sun sends warm golden light slanting low across the floor. It highlights all the dust motes floating in the air and cuts across the tips of Thor’s toes and makes them glow. Thor pats the floor beside him and Loki clambers down to sit next to him. He sticks his legs out as well, right into the stripe of sun, and Thor wiggles his toes and knocks their shoulders together.

“The sun is shining on us,” he says.

Loki buries his face in Thor’s shoulder, and Thor puts his arm around him, and they stay that way until the light creeps away from them.

*

It’s clear that Loki is exhausted, and when he tries to take the couch, Thor stops him.

“I have a bed,” he says.

“I don’t want to impose—”

“It’s very big.”

“Thor—”

“Loki.”

Thor puts on a clean pair of pyjama pants that smell like home and he nearly cries. Loki had done his laundry and given it that scent on purpose while he was still out of it, and Thor doesn’t deserve it. Loki wafts his own clothes away and replaces them with a pair of soft dark green pants that tie at the waist. It’s just one of a dozen simple magical acts he’s done today already, one Thor has seen him do thousands of times, and he wants to cry again at the utter _normalcy_ of it. At how much he’s missed his brother’s casual use of magic for things he doesn’t even need magic for.

He’s tired of constantly crying or being on the verge of tears. He’d taken up drinking to get rid of this very problem. Somehow he doesn’t want to start again though. Thinks maybe it’s time to run toward his problems again instead of away from them. He hasn’t been a hero in a long time, but being here with his brother makes him want to try.

Thor climbs into bed and turns down the covers next to him, and Loki crawls in. They face each other, curled on their sides. Loki brushes the tip of Thor’s nose with his own, and Thor presses a gentle kiss to his lips. Loki is smiling when he pulls back, but his eyes are already closed and his breathing is starting to slow.

Thor closes his eyes too, and they sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

The Valkyrie wakes them up unceremoniously the next morning by knocking on the wall by their heads and then shoving a small electronic device at Thor’s face.

“It’s for you,” she says. “You really need to get your own phone.”

Thor waves her away and puts the ‘phone’ to his ear. Whatever he’s hearing he doesn’t like, because he begins to scowl, and then he throws the covers off and stalks out of the room. The Valkyrie raises an eyebrow at Loki, who’s still laying on the bed rubbing his face.

“I brought coffee,” she says.

'Coffee' turns out to be a wonderfully bittersweet potion that clears the cobwebs out of Loki’s sleepy brain, and he gulps it down gratefully in the kitchen while eavesdropping on Thor’s raised voice from the other room.

“Who is he talking to?” he asks.

The Valkyrie shrugs. “I told him he was going to get an earful from Stark. Bruce, too.”

Thor comes into the kitchen and tosses the phone at the Valkyrie, then takes the paper cup of coffee she's holding out and drinks it down in one long pull.

“That bad?” the Valkyrie says.

“I hung up on them,” Thor says.

“I’m not playing message boy anymore,” she tells him. “You figured out that stupid game system, you can figure out a phone.”

“I know I can, I just don’t want to,” Thor grumbles. He tips his cup up again to get the last drops out, then crumples it and throws it on the floor.

“ _Thor_ ,” Loki says, horrified. “No wonder this place was such a shithole.”

“Sorry,” Thor mutters, and scoops up his garbage. “Habit.”

“Anyway,” the Valkyrie says. “The two of you should make yourselves presentable. There’s a lot of people out there who’d like to see their King and thank him.” She looks at Loki. “They wouldn’t mind seeing their Prince either. And if you think you’re going to leave me to handle all the fallout of this by myself with no input from you two, you’re both sorely mistaken. If I find you hiding in here playing video games and drinking beer, I _will_ murder you.”

Thor looks morose. Loki finishes the last sip of his coffee and turns to the Valkyrie.

“What’s a phone?”

*

After the Valkyrie leaves, Thor and Loki wash up and clean their teeth and neaten their hair. Loki gets a look at himself in the mirror for the first time. He looks the same, he supposes. Same hair, same nose, same eyes. Same wrinkles. Just how he looked the day that Thanos got him by the neck. He wonders if Thor brought this body back from memory or if the universe simply has a “Loki” template that it applied to his disembodied soul.

Loki watches Thor tying his hair half-up in the mirror. _He kissed me three times yesterday,_ Loki thinks.

“How is the hand working?” Loki asks. “Is the dexterity alright?”

“It’s perfect,” Thor says.

“I’m sorry.”

Thor turns to him with a quizzical tilt to his head. “For what?”

“Cutting your arm off.”

“Don’t be sorry. It saved me. That gauntlet...it’s more power than any one being should have. I’m lucky that an arm is all I lost.”

“You did actually die for a moment,” Loki says. “I had to use one of the stones to get you back.”

Thor takes Loki’s burned right hand with his uru left hand and holds it palm up. Traces the injury with his other hand.

“We’ve brought each other back from the dead, then,” Thor says. He looks up at Loki and smiles. “How many other people can say they’ve done that?”

Loki closes his hand into a loose fist and takes it back.

“I couldn’t let you go on to Valhalla when I’d only just left it.”

Loki’s own memories of Valhalla are dim. They flicker at the edges of his thoughts—brief glimpses of golden light, of a great hall, of the feeling of his mother beside him—and then, like a bonfire roaring to life in a dark cave, Thor. Thor, great and terrible and all-encompassing, and Loki recalls with great clarity how in that moment he had adored his brother and feared him in equal measure, and trembled under his attention.

He feels the echoes of it now, with Thor’s gaze on him and three kisses still lingering on his lips.

“Thank you,” Thor says.

And now it’s Loki’s turn to say, “For what?”

“Everything. Coming back with me. Saving me twice, apparently. Staying here. This—” He points to his metal arm. 

“Oh, is that all?” Loki says. He keeps his tone light, but he’s not exactly used to Thor being generous with his thank yous and his heart is eating them up. 

"No," Thor says, "but it's a start."

Loki stares at him, touched into silence, and Thor smiles at him again and then turns away to finish getting ready.

*

It’s cool but sunny and the spring air is full of joy and laughter. Loki gets a surprisingly warm welcome from New Asgard. He’d not expected the people to care whether the treacherous second son had returned or not, but he’s greeted with genuine smiles and clasped forearms. From what he’s able to gather, his rule has gone down as a short but pleasant blip, and after so much loss everyone is just happy for _anyone_ to still be alive. 

Loki’s welcome may be warm, but Thor’s is ecstatic. Word has spread quickly over Midgard that it had been he who had reversed the Snap. Thor shakes so many hands and hugs so many people that Loki’s sure he’s made personal physical contact with every person in New Asgard by the end of the day. 

Loki watches him. It’s all a far cry from the pomp and splendor of Asgard. The people are dressed plainly in Midgardian fashion, as is Thor. There are no honor guards, no trumpets—just Thor and the people who love him. Thor is gracious with everyone who wants a moment of his time, but there seems to be someone he’s looking for, and Loki can see that his smile never really reaches his eyes.

“What is it?” Loki asks him during a rare moment alone. They’ve escaped down to the docks to watch the sun set, and the wind is coming in off the water. Loki can feel his suit getting coated in salt and he doesn’t even want to think about the tangled frizzy mess his hair is going to be.

Thor kicks at a coil of rope and stares out across the water before answering.

“I knew that Fandral and Volstagg and Hogun wouldn’t be coming back,” Thor says. “But I didn’t realize how much it would hurt, still. And…” He takes a deep breath. “I was sure Sif would be here.”

“Oh!” Loki says, and then fidgets. “I…” He takes a deep breath. There’s no good way to say it, so he just says it. “I banished her.”

Thor turns to him, startled.

“When I was Odin,” Loki says. “Her and Heimdall. They were always able to see right through me.”

Thor is still staring at him.

“I’m sure Heimdall can find her,” Loki finishes. He doesn’t apologize. He’d taken Odin’s place out of self preservation and he would do it again.

Thor huffs a watery sounding laugh, then turns to look out across the water. He swipes at his nose with the back of his hand. Loki is unsettled. He was expecting anger, as he’d gotten from Thor every time his brief tenure as Odin had come up before.

Grief has softened many of Thor’s hard edges, it seems. Loki doesn’t know how to feel about it. Doesn’t know how to navigate it. So he runs on instinct, which right now is telling him that his brother needs a hug. He slips his arm around Thor’s back and hugs him from the side, and Thor’s arm comes up around him.

“I thought I’d put everyone back in their proper places,” Thor says. “I think I remember finding her soul? When I was doing it, it was so clear—I knew _everyone_ , and it felt like I’d know them forever—but now it’s all mist.”

“Perhaps she had somewhere else she wanted to be for now,” Loki says. He’s quiet for a moment, and then, “It’s the same for me. I know I was dead, and I remember bits of it, but like you said...it’s mist.”

“What _do_ you remember?”

“I remember you.”

Thor looks at him and Loki offers a tight-lipped smile. Thor squeezes him and kisses his temple, and Loki’s eyes falls shut as he leans into it. He and Thor have always been physically affectionate, but he thinks it’s different now. Thor’s kisses have never felt like they did yesterday. The energy between them has shifted, somehow.

For his part, Loki has always loved Thor the wrong way. He’d buried it so long ago that he’d simply grown used to the way it ached under his skin. Thor has given him an inch, though, and Loki thinks it might burst free of him any moment, and then he won’t be able to bury it ever again.

Loki tilts his face towards Thor. He wants to see what Thor will do. Thor’s free hand cups his neck and thumbs at his jaw. It feels like a lover’s touch. It sets Loki’s belly trembling.

“OY!” the Valkyrie calls to them from the shore. 

*

They eat dinner with the Valkyrie and Heimdall at her house, fish stew and fresh bread. Thor turns down beer in favor of water with bubbles in it. Loki tries a sip and finds it harsh and metallic tasting.

“We should have a feast,” the Valkyrie says. “Like we used to on Asgard.”

“You haven’t been on Asgard in millennia,” Loki points out.

“So? Are you telling me you cancelled feasts?”

“I agree,” Heimdall says. “It will do our spirits good.”

“It will require some planning,” Thor says. “If we’re going to do it we should do it properly. A full ten days. I don’t think we’ve had one since we came here.”

“It’s settled, then,” the Valkyrie says. “Cheers.” She takes a swig of her own beer. “Oh, and the media is already bothering me about getting an interview with you,” she says to Thor. Each of her words is clipped. “Get. A damn. Phone.”

Thor holds up his hands in surrender and the Valkyrie nods at him and mouths _thank you_.

Heimdall looks at Loki with a question in his eyes and Loki shrugs back at him. “What’s a phone?” Heimdall says.

*

Thor and Loki make their way back to Thor’s house. They walk along the edge of a small bluff, the ocean gently lapping at the rocky beach below them. It’s nighttime, and the only illumination is the twinkling electric light coming from people’s windows and the reflection of it on the water. Loki slips his arm through Thor’s. He can tell that something is still bothering him. Loki’s own brain is blessedly blank for once.

“You’re thinking so loudly I can hear you,” Loki says. Thor sighs.

“They were all thanking me today,” Thor says.

“As well they should.”

“It was me who led them to ruin in the first place. I caused Ragnarok. I failed to kill Thanos _twice_. There would be nothing to thank me for if I hadn’t fucked everything up in the first place. They should be cursing me.”

Loki stops walking. He doesn’t let go of Thor’s arm, so Thor stops too and turns to face him.

“Ragnarok was prophesied long before you or I were ever born,” Loki says. “If you’re going to cast blame for that somewhere, do it on Odin and his lies. Or even me. I’m the one who awakened Surtur.”

“No—”

“I’m not finished. I’ve told you many lies in our lives, brother, but I tell you only truth tonight. What Thanos did was not your fault. The fault lies with him and him alone."

“I failed to kill him when it counted,” Thor says thickly.

“ _And so did everyone else_ ,” Loki says, the intensity of his own voice surprising him. “Why should that burden be only yours to bear?”

“I—” Thor’s voice cuts off, choked. Loki cups Thor’s face in his hands. The night is dark but for the glittering of Thor’s eyes. It feels good to repay Thor for his kind words from that morning. It feels right.

“Thor,” Loki says gently, tenderly. “You’re the one who brought everyone back. You’re a hero.”

Thor presses Loki’s hands to his face and closes his eyes.

“It feels like too little, too late,” Thor says.

“You’re a _hero_ ,” Loki says. “I could ask anyone here and they’d all agree with me.”

“Is that what you think, too?”

“I’ve always thought that. Even at my worst, I’ve thought that. Even at _your_ worst. And this is far from your worst. This is you saving the universe.”

Thor draws in a shaky breath and kisses Loki’s palm. Loki runs his hands down Thor’s neck to his shoulders, down his arms, then loops his arm through Thor’s again. They resume their walk along the bluff. Loki presses himself even closer to Thor’s side this time, and Thor holds their clasped arms tightly to himself.

Loki has never bared his own sentiment so completely before, and he feels shaken. He wants to hide the nakedness he’s feeling behind a veil of sarcasm and mockery, but he bites his tongue. He’ll not cheapen the moment by trying to pretend it didn’t happen. He knows Thor would see through it, anyway. Thor has always been more adept at speaking the language of the heart than he has.

His golden brother.

He wants to grab Thor around the back of his neck and haul him down into another of those kisses. He wants to sink down into the yielding grass with him with no one to see them but the sea and the stars, and whisper each other’s names to the night. He wants to make Thor feel as loved as he deserves to be.

He _wants_.

They’ve no sooner entered Thor’s house than Thor is closing the door behind them and turning into Loki’s arms. He says nothing, just cups his hand around the base of Loki’s jaw and kisses him, and kisses him, and Loki finds himself sagging backwards to lean against the wall, his body gone limp and pliant as he tilts his face up for more. It’s so dark. Loki feels like he’s floating. Like he’s dreaming. He clutches at the front of Thor’s shirt as Thor kisses along his jaw to his neck, and tries not to whine.

“Is this ok?” Thor rumbles, and Loki nods and breathes out a voiceless “yes.” Thor finds his mouth again and licks into the kiss this time, and Loki opens his mouth for him and lets him in.

It’s all he’s ever wanted, and it’s been buried so long. It’s clawing its way out of his chest now, huge and terrible. Loki breaks away, gasping. It’s a great winged thing with eyes of fire, and it’s bigger than he is, and it’s going to consume him.

“Thor,” Loki says urgently. “Is this...I’m not...are you…” He can’t find the words. He needs to know that Thor wants this as much as he does. Needs to know it’s not a whim or a lark. That it means as much to Thor as it does to him. Can’t imagine that it does. Wants to weep with the enormity of it.

“You’re not what?” Thor asks, his voice concerned. His thumb is stroking Loki’s jaw.

“I need to breathe,” Loki gets out through the tightness in his throat.

He pushes roughly past Thor and into the house. Thor trails after him, turning on lamps, shrugging out of his jacket. Loki goes to the bedroom and sits on the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and Thor sits next to him. Quiet.

“Why did you bring me back?” Loki says to the floor. It’s not the question he meant to ask.

Thor rubs his hand down Loki’s curved back and then back up again.

“I love you.”

Loki scoffs. “You love a lot of people. Why did you bring _me_ back?”

Thor is quiet for a moment. “I told you once that I thought we were going to fight side by side forever and I meant it. I spent four years thinking you were dead, and then another five knowing that you were. The idea of spending the rest of my life without you was…” He scoffs as well. “I nearly drank myself to death to escape having to think about it.”

Thor’s hand squeezes the back of Loki’s neck, and Loki looks over at him.

“I need to know…” Loki starts, then stops, and swallows painfully. Anything he says will be an admission he doesn’t know that he wants to make. He hears himself talking anyway, and his voice sounds so pitiful that he wishes he’d kept silent. “I need to know that this means something to you. That this is...more than just the last two days…”

“Hey,” Thor says. “Of course it does. Is.”

Loki sniffs and rubs at his nose, then stares down at his hand. It’s shaking slightly. Thor takes it and kisses it.

“What do you want me to tell you?” Thor asks. His tone is gentle, warm. “How I’ve dreamed of you all these centuries? How every person I’ve ever been with has been a substitute for the one person I wasn’t allowed to want? How the thought of wasting even a moment more of our lives together is unbearable? It’s true.”

Loki chokes down a sob and turns his face to Thor’s. Kisses him with unsteady lips.

“I thought I was alone in this,” Loki says.

“You’re not alone. I’m here.”

Loki kisses him again, and Thor kisses him back, puts his arms around him. Deepens it into something immeasurable. Loki is drowning in him. Thor bears him down onto the bed and Loki goes, drawing Thor with him, their mouths still connected.

Loki drags Thor’s face away by the hair.

“Am I still your brother?” Loki asks.

“Always,” Thor says roughly. Loki nods, satisfied, and pulls his face back down.

Loki would be happy to do just this all night. It’s all so new. Every second that they’re together like this feels like the first. Thor’s lips are so soft under his, and lovely, and he makes the most breathtaking little noises that if Loki weren’t already in love he he’d fall right then and there. They pause for breath, curled together, faces kissed-out and pink. Loki sneaks his hand under the edge of Thor’s sweater and caresses the curve of his belly. He feels Thor shiver. He’s hard and aching, and he knows Thor is too. It had been impossible to conceal, as tangled together as they’ve been.

“Tell me how to please you,” Thor says, his voice hoarse. “My hands, my mouth, my...me. Or, if you’d rather, the other way around. Anything. Anything you want.”

Loki kisses him again, because he can, and his belly flutters wildly. Imagining Thor buried inside of him makes him feel on the edge of hysteria. Imagining burying himself inside of Thor nearly breaks him.

“What if I tell you to get up and leave?” Loki asks, because he can hardly ever resist poking at his brother.

Thor groans. “Lokiii. Please don’t ask me to do that.”

“But would you?”

“You wouldn’t tell me to leave.”

“I wouldn’t?”

Thor pounces, rolling over to cover Loki with his body so swiftly that Loki doesn’t even have time to squirm before Thor is pinning his wrists and kissing him senseless again.

“You wouldn’t,” Thor says against his lips.

“Mmm,” Loki says, and lets himself be ravished. Thor lets go of his wrists and Loki wraps his arms around Thor’s neck. “Is just this ok tonight?” Loki breathes as Thor makes love to his neck.

Thor kisses the tip of his nose and smiles and they lose themselves in each other’s eyes for a moment.

“Yeah. Just this is ok.”


	6. Chapter 6

Thor is sitting at the kitchen table with Loki, Valkyrie, and Heimdall. He’s drinking sweet coffee with milk and chewing absentmindedly at a chocolate donut and staring too much at his brother. They’re supposed to be eating breakfast and discussing plans for the feast, but Thor can’t concentrate on much except for the delicate way that Loki blows on his coffee and the perfect little moue that his lips make, and how much he wants to kiss them; or the way that Loki has left his hair to its natural devices and how it’s falling down to frame his face in dark curls, and how much Thor wants to runs his hands through it; or the way Loki’s elegant hands are gesturing while he’s talking, and what they might look like wrapped around—

He realizes someone has been saying his name.

“Thor? Thor?”

“Hmm?” he says, but then all of them are turning simultaneously towards the window.

There’s a noise coming from outside, like some kind of machinery, and it’s getting louder. Pulsing.

“What the hell is that?” Loki says, going to look out the window, and Valkyrie goes with him.

Thor recognizes the sound from his days as part of the Avengers team.

“A helicopter,” Thor says.

He throws the front door open. He’s still in his pyjamas and robe, and the wind from the helicopter blows his hair back and makes his robe stream out like a cape. The sound is deafening. The helicopter is huge and black and touches down in the field outside Thor’s house. He thinks he sees Natasha in the pilot’s seat.

Any joy that Thor might have had at seeing the people he once called friends is quickly dashed. The figures striding across the grass are suited for a fight. He counts seven. Banner is easy to spot, huge as he is. Stark in his armor. Natasha. Barton and his quiver. The Captain carries his shield in front of him, and is closely flanked by a man with a metal arm much like Thor’s. The last is probably Scott Lang; his face is covered.

They arrange themselves in a semicircle in front of Thor’s door. There’s no mistaking the threat.

“Thor,” Steve says. He rests the edge of his shield on the ground and holds onto the top of it. His friend has one of the largest guns Thor’s ever seen.

Thor narrows his eyes and says nothing.

“You’re a tough man to get ahold of,” Steve continues.

“Maybe I don’t want to be gotten ahold of,” Thor says. He lets his arms hang loose and ready at his sides. The door is still open behind him and he can feel Loki and Valkyrie and Heimdall step out onto the porch. The mortals subtly tense up; their grips tighten, their hands move an inch towards weapons.

Barton looks at Loki and openly sneers.

“Hello again, darling,” Loki says smoothly. He comes to stand next to Thor, shoulder to shoulder.

“Please let me shoot him,” Barton says.

“Come on, guys,” Banner interjects, his tone a little pleading. “Let’s all just be calm.”

Loki scoffs. “Ironic, coming from you, Bruce.”

“Alright,” Stark says, stepping forward and putting his hand up. He doesn’t have his helmet on, a weak display of non-hostility; Thor knows it can cover his face in an instant. “Look. This doesn’t have to end badly. Thor, we need you to come with us, because… Well, because you saved the damn universe. There’s a whole lotta people want a piece of your pie right now, you know what I’m saying? Every world leader wants to shake your hand, reporters are going out of their minds wanting interviews. We have _aliens_ contacting us, and they want to talk to _you_.”

“If all you want is me, why are you armed,” Thor says flatly.

“I’m sorry,” Natasha says. Her face is the mostly impassive mask it usually is, but her eyes and voice are sincere. “I really am. But Loki is a war criminal.”

“We gotta take him in,” Stark says.

Loki laughs, delighted. “What, the seven of you? At least if you’d brought the wizard with you I might think you were serious.”

“We beat you once,” Steve says. His jaw is tense. “Doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to do it again.”

“I _let_ you beat me once, you dull thing,” Loki says.

“And last time you didn’t have to go through me,” Thor says.

“Or them,” Loki says, pointing backwards with his chin.

“Thor,” Banner says. “Buddy. We won’t hurt him, ok?”

“No,” Thor says. “You won’t.” His hand is flexing, itching to call Stormbreaker.

“Why are you protecting this guy, anyway?” Barton says. “I watched him try to kill you in New Mexico. He stabbed you and dropped you out of an airplane in New York. He’s not your friend.”

Thor risks a quick glance at Loki. His eyes are bright and his mouth is set in a thin line that might look like a smirk to other people, but that Thor knows is something else. Thor’s heart gives a funny little twist.

“He’s my brother,” Thor says simply.

“Are you his friend, _Clint_ ,” Loki says. His voice is dripping disdain, and he turns Barton’s name into something filthy. “Is that what you call yourself? I’ve been inside your mind, you loathsome piece of excrement, and if you think for even one second—”

“Enough!” Stark says. It only makes Loki round on him next.

“And what of you, Stark? Were you my brother’s friend when he needed it? Or did you leave him alone like the coward you are, hiding in your metal suit like a soft-bellied little worm—”

“Loki,” Thor says gently at the same time Banner protests, “Hey, that’s not fair—”

“Fair?” Loki says, turning to Banner sharply. His cheeks are going red, his nostrils flaring. “What, exactly, about any of this is _fair_? Was it the part where Asgard got destroyed? Or how about when you failed so spectacularly to deal with Thanos that you got half our people and Heimdall and me all killed? Or maybe it was when you fucked off for five years to become a celebrity on this disgusting midden of a planet and left your so-called ‘friend’ to rot—”

Loki takes a step towards Banner in his fury, and Barton has his bow out and an arrow already nocked before he can take another.

Loki goes stock still, and he and Barton stare at each other. The air is so tense it feels liable to snap at any second.

“Do it,” Barton says. “Take one more step. Please.”

“Do you honestly think one of your pathetic arrows is going to do anything to me?” Loki sneers.

Several things happen simultaneously. Barton looses his arrow. Loki lights up green with his seidr, arms out, hair rising up against gravity. The rest of the Avengers go into fighting stances: the Captain behind his shield, Stark snapping his faceplate shut and bringing his laser to bear, Natasha drawing her gun. Scott Lang seemingly disappears.

Barton’s arrow and Natasha’s bullet disintegrate when they hit Loki’s magic. Stark’s laser blast goes wide because Valkyrie has sprung into action and hit him in the chest with both feet, and he’s gone sailing halfway across the field. Loki snarls and looks like he’s snatching something from the air, and then he hurls whatever it is as hard as he can. Scott Lang reappears in mid air, arms and legs windmilling.

“STOP THIS!” Thor roars.

He calls the storm to him. The sky goes black and cracks open and Stormbreaker flies to his hand. He is armored now, and the lightning is bursting from his veins to spill from his eyes and wreathe his body in crackling bolts. It’s a fierce joy, as it always is. It makes him feel larger than himself, somehow. Perhaps in these moments he is. He swings Stormbreaker around in a giant arc and slams it into the ground, knocking the mortals back.

“ENOUGH!” he bellows.

Loki is standing next to him, armored as well, chest heaving, daggers in his hands. Valkyrie and Heimdall come up to flank them. The mortals climb dazedly to their feet, and in their faces is a dawning understanding. They are seven against four and they are woefully outmatched. Under the blindfold of friendship they’ve invited a people to live among them who are more ancient and powerful than they had let themselves realize, and though this planet is their home, they exist here at the whim of the gods, and not the other way around.

Thor has a brief moment of sorrow that it’s come to this. But the reality is that he’ll choose his brother every time.

“Loki is staying here,” Thor says. “Do not try to touch him again. Leave now, and out of respect for our friendship I’ll consider this forgotten.”

“Or don’t, and let me kill you all,” Loki spits.

“You probably shouldn’t come back,” Valkyrie says.

Heimdall’s voice is gentle but menacing. “We’ll see you coming.”

*

Thor and Loki are back in the house. The mortals are gone. Valkyrie and Heimdall have left. Loki’s blood is up and he’s pacing furiously, his coat flaring out behind him as he stalks around the living room. Thor is still riled too, and sparks dance around his fingertips.

“Can you believe,” Loki is sputtering, “They...I...just…” He cuts off with a wordless growl of agitation.

Thor drops Stormbreaker to the ground and lets his armor dissolve.

Loki’s eyes meet his and something electric burns between them. Thor is on him in an instant, crushing their mouths together, his hands in Loki’s hair, holding his head in place. Loki snarls into the kiss, fisting his hands in Thor’s shirt, biting Thor’s lip hard enough that it hurts. It’s a good pain. They struggle with each other, clawing, trying to get closer.

“Fuck,” Loki gasps when Thor starts sucking a bruise onto his neck. Thor can’t even begin to articulate his feelings. How standing side by side with Loki against those who would hurt him had activated some darkly protective, possessive part of him. How seeing his brother’s rage on his behalf had cracked his heart into pieces. How he needs Loki right now more than he ever has in his life. Needs him to know how much Thor loves him.

Thor carries Loki to the bedroom while he clings to his neck and then lays him out on the bed. Loki dissolves his armor until he’s completely bare and Thor groans.

“Gods,” Thor says. “I’d wanted to do it myself, but look at you. I could eat you.”

“What’s stopping you?”

Loki is leaning on his elbows and looking up at Thor, his eyes glittering and hungry. Gone is the hesitance from last night. They both want. Thor falls on him to kiss him again, urgent and wet, their tongues sliding against each other, sucking on each other’s lips, their teeth knocking together in their clumsiness. Thor still feels like the storm. Like he’s more than his body can contain.

“Get rid of my clothes,” he pants, sitting up to kneel astride Loki’s hips. In the next instant he’s as bare as Loki is, his cock jutting up hard between them. Loki rakes his hands down Thor’s chest, down his sides, squeezes his thighs harshly.

“Fuck,” Loki gasps again, and drags Thor back down for another messy open-mouthed kiss.

Thor licks his way down his brother’s body in three sloppy moves—breast, belly, hip—and Loki whines and wriggles underneath him. Then Thor is pushing his legs apart and licking across his hole with the flat of his tongue, and Loki cries out and arches off the bed, clamping his thighs around Thor’s neck.

Thor licks his finger and slides it in. He feels wild. He’d thought that when—if—they ever did this it might be slow...reverent...tender. It’s none of those things. They’re both so needy and desperate, and Thor is aching with it the enormity that this isn’t one-sided and never had been, and that his beautiful brother is welcoming him between his legs unreservedly.

Thor plies Loki open with his tongue until he can slip another finger in as well, slick with spit, and then ruthlessly searches for the spot he hopes will make him see stars. Loki’s hands are scrabbling at his shoulders and hair, and when Thor finds what he’s looking for, Loki pulls his hair so hard that Thor’s eyes water.

The sound that comes out of Loki’s mouth has Thor groaning, and he twists his fingers again, and then licks up Loki’s cock to lay a kiss to the head and then swallow him down.

He’s starting to lose control. He can feel sparks dancing off of him. Loki bucks underneath him every time it happens, moaning wordlessly, his whole body writhing and arching. A dark little part of Thor’s heart hates that anyone might ever have heard his brother’s voice sound like this before, and vows that none other ever will.

“P-please—Thor—” Loki is nearly sobbing. “So close—please—”

Thor fingers him roughly again, swirls his tongue around Loki’s cock and chases his mouth with his hand and fists it up over the sensitive head, and he lets one spark loose on purpose. Loki wails and comes all over himself, arcs of pearly white landing all the way up to his collarbones.

Thor sits up and milks him dry. Leans down to lick up a streak that landed on Loki’s nipple, and Loki whimpers. Straddles Loki’s hips, kneeling, and runs his hand in the mess that Loki’s made, then starts stripping his own cock harshly. Loki kneads his thighs and urges him on with breathy encouragement, _that’s it brother, come on, yes_ , until Thor makes a sound like he’s been mortally wounded and spends on Loki’s chest as well. It comes from somewhere deep inside him, and the strength of it takes him by surprise. He finds himself falling upon Loki to kiss him through it, and Loki wraps his arms around his neck and holds him fast.

He collapses next to Loki and buries his face in Loki’s neck, feels Loki stroking his hair. He’s overwhelmed and spent. He doesn’t want to think. Just wants to lie here like this for the foreseeable future. Loki vanishes their mess and snuggles him closer, winding his fingers in Thor’s hair. They don’t say anything for a long while.

Loki is curling a little piece of Thor’s hair around his finger and letting it go, smoothing it down and doing it over again.

“We can’t stay here,” he finally says, softly.

“I know,” Thor says.

Loki’s voice is apologetic. “I’m sorry.”

Thor squeezes him tighter. “I know.”

“I’ll go with you wherever you want,” Loki says, and it’s almost a whisper.

Thor closes his eyes and doesn’t cry. He hadn’t known, but he’d hoped. “Thank you.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more chapter after this lads

It’s been a week since the Avengers’ failed visit and New Asgard is in an excited, expectant mood. Shipments of food and drink are starting to arrive. Pavilions and stages are being erected. The New Asgard Players are going about practicing their lines for the new play they’re going to be putting on, while the children huddle in giggling clusters eagerly painting new backdrops for them.

Loki is excellent at ordering people around, and there’s a lot of ordering to do, so he doesn’t notice until mid afternoon on Friday that he hasn’t seen Thor since breakfast. No one else has seen him either, which makes Loki frown. He’s not at the docks, or helping with construction or unloading; he’s not taking petitions or signing paperwork; he’s not even playing that ridiculous game with Korg and Miek.

Loki is standing in the street thinking of where to look next when one of the smaller children tugs hesitantly on his pants leg. He looks down, and a very serious set of eyes peers back up at him through dirty blonde fringe.

“I sawed King For,” the little girl says.

Loki goes down to one knee. “Did you?” he says. “Where did you see him?”

The girl points away from the settlement, out into the grassy bluffs. “I sawed him go dat way.”

“Thank you, darling,” he tells her. “You’ve been very helpful. What’s your name?”

“Astrid.” She cracks a hesitant smile at him, and he smiles back.

“Where are your parents?” he asks her.

Her smile fades and she shrugs one shoulder. Loki’s mouth tightens. He knows that feeling.

“It’s alright,” he says gently, “I don’t have my parents anymore either. Are you helping with the play?”

Her face brightens up and she nods eagerly.

“I bet they could use your help right now. Why don’t you run along?”

Loki knows what lies in the direction that the girl pointed.

He finds Thor sitting on the rock where they found Odin. That day is still etched sharply into Loki’s memory—the lush green grass, the gray clouds muddling the line between sea and sky, the lonely call of seabirds—his own heart in his throat—the way his whole world had shifted sideways and reformed.

It’s different today. The sky is a high fathomless blue with wispy white clouds. The grass is dotted with spring flowers. He’s found his brother and not his father. 

Wordlessly, he sits next to Thor and takes his hand.

They stare out into the distance for a long time.

“He said this place was home,” Thor says, finally. “But I’ve gone and ruined that as well.”

Loki doesn’t take his eyes off the horizon. “Regretting bringing me back, then?”

Thor turns to him, startled. “What? No! Never. I—”

“It’s alright,” Loki says. “I’m happy to ruin his plans even after he’s dead.”

“Brother,” Thor says, miserable sounding, “you know that’s not when I meant…”

“Shh,” Loki says, and kisses Thor’s knuckles. “I’m not the angry thing I used to be. I know what you meant. Mind you, it’s still foolish, but—” He shrugs.

“Do you ever...miss him?”

Loki snorts. “No.” He strokes Thor’s knuckles and studies their interlinked hands. “Not exactly, anyway.”

“It’s strange,” Thor says. “I find myself missing home. Asgard. The way things used to be. And yet…”

“There was pain there, too,” Loki finishes quietly.

“Yes.”

Loki knows it well. The pain of the mold they’d been cast in, and how they had each struggled against it in different ways. He’d once thought that it was only himself who had struggled. It had been too hard to realize while he was still in the thick of it that Thor had been bound just as tightly and had chafed just as much. Now, free from almost all the trappings of their old lives, it’s much easier to see. 

“I do miss her, though,” Loki says, putting a soft emphasis on _her_. Their hands tighten in each other’s grasps.

Thor’s voice is thick. “I spoke with her. When… I asked her if she would come back. She said she wouldn’t. That she was meant to die when she did.”

It stings more than Loki thought it would, and he blinks back tears.

“I was with her in Valhalla,” Loki says. “I think I was. It’s all so dim. I can _feel_ her, though. In my memory.”

“I wish she was here.”

“I do too.”

Loki moves closer. Wraps his arm around Thor’s back and leans against him, and sighs when Thor drapes his arm across Loki’s shoulders, heavy and anchoring. Neither of them mentions the wetness on the other’s cheeks. 

“I didn’t change Ragnarok,” Thor says after a little while. “I thought about it. But...then I thought, if I do this for myself, isn’t it unfair to everyone else in the universe who’s lost people? Why don’t I bring them back too? Just bring back everyone who’s ever died who has a person alive that misses them?” Thor pauses to sniffle. “I didn’t, obviously. Part of living is dying, right? We can’t all go on forever. And...I think I made the right decision, but every day I look into the faces of our people and I see the grief of those whose loved ones I didn’t bring back, and I get the most awful sucking feeling in my gut…”

Loki thinks of little Astrid who pointed his way here, and how she likely lost her parents in Ragnarok, and his heart aches for his brother and the decision he had to make.

“You did the right thing,” Loki says.

“If only I’d prevented it in the first place—”

“You can’t think like that,” Loki says. “Odin kept his secrets until his dying breath. He did _nothing_ to prepare us for the doom that he knew was coming. _Nothing._ The Norns decided that outcome for us long, long ago. Maybe…” Loki trails off. “Maybe it was time for Asgard not to be an empire anymore.”

“The price we paid for Father’s foolishness,” Thor says, a little bitterly. “Did you know I never actually wanted to rule?”

“You’d rather be a good man than a great king,” Loki says softly, remembering.

Thor scoffs. “I don’t know that I’m that, either,” he says. “But even before that. Even when I was so eager for my coronation. I was overcompensating, you know?”

The corner of Loki’s mouth quirks up and he can’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “That’s one word for it.”

Thor lets out a small laugh and rubs his cheek against Loki’s hair. “I was a real shithead.”

Loki smiles for real. “That’s another, better word for it.”

“Mother told me…” Thor sounds far away. “She said not to worry about what I’m supposed to be, but to worry about what I want to be.”

“What do you want to be?”

Thor strokes Loki’s shoulder and kisses his temple. “Mother asked me the same thing. I told her that I want to be happy. But I have no idea what would make me happy. I’ve never been free to even consider what I want to do with my life. All I know right now is that I don’t want to be king, and...I want to be wherever you are.”

Warmth floods Loki’s chest at the words. “Then stay with me,” he says, “and we’ll figure it out together.”

Loki pulls back to look Thor in the face, and Thor kisses him. Loki melts into it, molding his body against him, and doesn’t even bother to pretend that he’s not helplessly weak for the way Thor makes him feel.

When they break apart several breathless minutes later, Thor’s eyes are bright, and he cups Loki’s neck and jaw.

“I’m so glad you came back to me,” he says. “I was lost for so long.”

When they finally leave, Loki nearly trips over something in the grass. He nudges it over with his foot, then bends down to get a closer look. 

“Oh,” he says.

It’s Mjolnir, or what’s left of her. It makes his breath quicken in his lungs even now to remember his blind panic when she’d shattered. Some balance had fundamentally shifted that day. Loki’s grateful, in a way. It had brought him here, roundabout though the path had been.

“Look,” he says to Thor.

Thor kneels down next to him and rubs his face with his hand. “You know, I’d wondered if the enchantment still held. If I’d be able to pick her up at all. Sometimes I thought about coming here to find out, but I never dared. I didn’t want to know.”

Loki plucks one of the chunks of broken metal out of its grassy shroud and brushes it off.

“Looks like the enchantment’s gone,” Loki says. “Sorry. Guess you’ll just have to take my word for it that you’re still worthy.” That earns him a kiss, and he smiles into it. The words aren’t mere flattery, however; Thor is the best person that Loki knows and he doesn’t need a hammer to tell him that.

For some reason it seems wrong to leave the pieces there, so they collect them and carry them back. The sun is starting to set, and their shadows precede them over the bluffs. The sky is darkening by the minute by the time they get back to the settlement. They run across the Valkyrie in the square saying goodnight to the people who’d been helping set up the stage for tomorrow, and she waves them over.

“Get Heimdall and come over for dinner,” Thor tells her.

Thor is standing at the kitchen counter doing something to a pile of vegetables. Loki is laying on the couch in the living room with his head positioned so that he has a perfect view into the kitchen and he looks his fill. Drinks up Thor’s broad back and thick arms. Thinks about squeezing his bottom. Biting it.

There’s a knock at the door and the Valkyrie and Heimdall come in with bottles of wine and armfuls of bread. Thor and Loki had left the pile of Mjolnir rubble sitting on the kitchen table, and the Valkyrie goes to sweep it to the side with her elbow so she can set down everything that she’s carrying.

The pile doesn’t move.

The Valkyrie frowns and tries again.

“Thor,” she says. “What the hell is this stuff?”

Thor is turning to look, and Loki is already on his feet, his pulse quickening.

“Do that again,” Loki orders, coming into the kitchen.

The Valkyrie and Heimdall set their loads down on the counter. Loki watches the Valkyrie with bated breath, unblinking. Heimdall watches Loki. The Valkyrie gives Loki a skeptical look, and tries to pick up one of the broken pieces.

It stays completely stuck to the table.

Loki utters a high shocked laugh and collapses onto a chair. Thor is right behind him, his hand on Loki’s shoulder, squeezing.

“What?” the Valkyrie says suspiciously. “Someone better explain what’s going on.”

“Brother,” Thor says. 

He’s still squeezing Loki’s shoulder, his grip so tight it’s painful. Loki’s hands are unsteady when he reaches out to touch the piece of Mjolnir that the Valkyrie had tried unsuccessfully to move.

He picks it up as though it weighs nothing.

He can’t help it; even though the Valkyrie and Heimdall are right there, he collapses over his own knees, face buried in his hands, and starts crying. He hears Thor ushering them out with murmured apologies, and then Thor is back, kneeling in front of him, his big hands running up and down Loki’s back as he shakes.

When Loki finally raises his head, Thor smiles at him, wide and sunny, his face full of joy and something that Loki can only call _pride_ , and Loki’s face crumples again. Thor strokes his cheeks, rubs his tears away with his thumbs.

“You did it,” Thor says, still smiling.

“I did it,” Loki says through tears, and falls on Thor’s lips, kissing him desperately. It’s all so overwhelming. Mjolnir’s enchantment had held, and the hammer had found him worthy. A thought surfaces from the swirling mess of his heart, which is that Thor had something to do with it. That he’d died and Thor had brought back only the good parts of him.

He doesn’t feel good, though. He just feels like Loki. And he loves Thor with every part of him, the good parts and the bad parts and the parts that have been twisted and hidden for so long that he doesn’t know what they are at all.

Thor carries him to the bedroom. Loki feels as light as air. He could float away into the stars. The only thing holding him down is Thor’s bulk between his thighs, Thor’s hands on his hips, Thor’s mouth on his cock. Their first time together had been a mad rush, but over the last week Loki has discovered that Thor is a more patient and giving lover than he ever would have imagined. Tonight he’s sucking Loki off so slowly and sweetly, like he enjoys every moment he gets to spend with Loki’s cock in his mouth and wants to draw it out as long as he can, and he makes Loki sigh and gasp until finally he’s turning his face into the pillows and begging, “Come on, finish me off, please.”

Thor hums, and instead of picking up his pace he licks down to Loki’s balls and suckles them gently, before licking over his hole and starting to work him open.

By the time Thor gets fours fingers into him, Loki is nearly shaking with it. He’d given up any kind of rational thought sometime around the second, and can do nothing more than lie there and take what Thor’s giving him, clutching onto any body part he can reach and moaning like he’s dying. Maybe he is, again. Mjolnir found him worthy and Thor is treating him like some kind of precious thing and maybe that’s good enough for his second go-around.

Thor leans up to kiss him and Loki tastes himself on Thor’s beard.

“Please,” Loki says.

Thor lines up his cock and fucks into him and it’s just the right side of too much. Loki thinks of a ship coming to port, an eagle lighting in its eyrie, a dagger sliding into a sheath.

“There you are,” Loki croons. He sighs and holds onto Thor’s arms as he rises up to meet him. “You found me.”

“I’ve got you,” Thor murmurs. “I’ll always find you.”

This part never lasts long enough, only because it never _could_ last long enough. It’s foolish that the universe is designed in such a way that they ever have to stop doing this. This is how they belong together. They come within seconds of each other, Loki flooding the space between them with hot slick spend, and Thor burying himself one last time as he clutches Loki to him. Loki’s heart is too big for his chest. There’s too much of him. He doesn’t know where to put it all.

They kiss with Thor’s cock softening inside of Loki’s body, until Loki’s chin and cheeks burn pink from Thor’s beard. Thor pulls back and rubs their noses together.

“Will you run away with me?” Thor asks. “Tomorrow?”

“I already said yes. But _yes_. Tomorrow, then.”

Thor smiles and kisses him again and keeps kissing him until both of their cocks begin to stiffen once more.

“Mmm,” Loki says, and spreads his legs wide for Thor to move on top of him.

When they’re finally spent, it’s somewhere near dawn. Loki draws Thor’s arm around him and hugs it to his chest and slips below the surface of sleep into the ocean of dreams below.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3333

Valkyrie barges in on them the next morning and throws the curtains open. Thor groans and covers his eyes and Loki burrows closer into his side, hiding his face.

“If you two are done being revolting, it’s time to get up,” Valkyrie says. “Busy day.”

Thor rubs his eyes. The festivities start today, and he and Loki are supposed to be there to kick them off. “We’re getting up,” he says.

Heimdall is going over a stack of papers in the kitchen. Thor drinks his coffee while he waits for Loki to finish in the bathroom.

“Heimdall told me about your hammer,” Valkyrie says. She looks in the vague direction of the bathroom. “What it means for _him_.”

“Ah,” Thor says. “Yeah. Sorry about making you leave last night. It was—”

“It’s alright. It was obvious we didn’t need to be there.”

Loki comes into the kitchen and Thor finds himself smiling foolishly at the sight of him. His hair is loose and wavy, and instead of the severe black suit that he likes to wear on Earth he’s clad in Asgardian festival wear: bright green leggings, a black tunic slashed through with gold, green silk ribbons tied around his upper arms and into his hair. He looks like he might have on any feast day a hundred years ago. The nostalgia hits Thor hard as he imagines how they might have been back then if they’d had the courage. Loki’s cheeks pink at Thor’s unabashed admiration.

“Alright, look you two,” Valkyrie says. “I know you’ve been sharing a bed, and I can’t say I blame you because that couch is frankly disgusting, but this is something more, isn’t it?”

Heimdall coughs. Thor’s stomach lurches a bit and both he and Loki take a beat too long to respond, and Valkyrie throws her hands up.

“You knew?” she says to Heimdall.

He gives her a serious look. “I can see _everything_. I’m very good at keeping my mouth shut.”

Valkyrie shakes her head and turns to Thor. “I’m not going to judge you. I’ve seen so much shit on Sakaar that this is downright wholesome. But I don’t know how the rest of the people are going to respond to their King and his brother opening their legs for each other.”

Thor recovers quickly. “About that,” he says, over-enunciating his words.

Valkyrie cocks an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t want to be King anymore.”

Thor leans back against the counter and folds his arms across his chest, and Valkyrie gives him a dubious look. Heimdall puts his papers down and folds his hands on top. Loki busies himself putting far too much cream and sugar in his coffee.

“You want him to be King, then?” she says, nodding towards Loki.

Loki snorts at that and looks up. “Heavens no. I had my fill of that already. Four years was three and a half years too long.”

“What, then?”

Thor sighs. He scratches at his beard while Valkyrie gives him a supremely unimpressed look.

“Well, I kind of pissed off my old friends,” Thor says.

“I vaguely recall that, yes.”

“And I don’t want Loki and me staying here to put New Asgard in jeopardy. We’ve had far too much of that. So here’s what I’m proposing. Loki and I leave. We go explore the cosmos a bit, look for Sif, try to find a new place for Asgard to settle. Earth is fine for now, but it’s not a home for us. And in the meantime…” Thor gives her the hopeful charming eyes that used to send the ladies swooning at court. “Perhaps you could be King in my stead?”

“No,” Valkyrie says flatly.

“Beg your pardon?” Loki says. “You’ve just been offered the throne of Asgard—”

“I don’t want it,” Valkyrie says. “Not any more than either one of you do.”

Thor fights the urge to huff. He shoots a look at Heimdall.

“Not me,” Heimdall says, putting his hands up.

“Honestly, you haven’t been acting like a King ever since—” Valkyrie nods her chin at Loki. “And we’ve been getting along just fine without you.”

Valkyrie’s words sting for all their truth. 

“It strikes me,” Heimdall says, his voice slow and deliberate, “that just as Asgard isn’t a place, it isn’t a monarch either.”

“...it’s a people,” Thor finishes for him. His shoulders slump. Are Heimdall and Valkyrie really suggesting what he thinks they’re suggesting?

Thor feels adrift for a moment. He’s never really wanted to rule Asgard, but he’s never imagined it without a monarch either. In his mind, Asgard is still this shining place, ancient and splendid, with a line of kings stretching back into the mists of time.

Is he going to be the one to end it?

“Thor,” Loki murmurs, touching his elbow lightly. His eyes are serious. “Remember what we spoke of yesterday? Perhaps it’s time for Asgard not to be an empire anymore.”

And just like that, it clicks into place. Ragnarok was always going to happen, and Thor was always going to be its agent, and unlike the would-be destructor of the universe he’ll not do anything by half measures. He’ll end her line of kings as well, and let her be reborn from the ashes of her bloody empire as something different. Perhaps, even, something better, if he can permit himself to hope.

He’s had so little of hope lately. He looks at his brother, at the familiar and cherished lines of his face, and feels it bloom warm within him.

He addresses everyone. 

“Then Asgard shall have no more kings,” he says. “It ends with me.”

It feels good as he says it. It feels right.

“If that is what you wish,” Heimdall says with a warm half-smile. His tone and his eyes are both approving, and Thor grins and claps him on the back and grips his shoulder. That his oldest and wisest friend and mentor approves means everything to him. 

A thread of giddiness teases at his heart. He’s been staggering under the weight of expectation and duty his entire life, and now it’s just gone. Evaporated. He feels so light he could sing.

“We should probably set up a council,” Valkyrie says.

Thor can’t stop smiling. “Of course, of course. Elections! We’ll have _elections_! Loki, can you believe it?” He reaches for Loki and tugs him forward, gets an arm around his shoulders and squeezes until Loki’s laugh-complaining, “Thor _enough_.”

Valkyrie is half smiling, shaking her head and rolling her eyes at Thor’s display.

“Loki and I can check back in with you after we leave,” Thor says. “Heimdall and I have this little eyeball trick—don’t we, Heimdall—we’ll keep each other updated—”

This is more than Thor could have hoped for, and for the first time in a very long time, he feels excited for the future.

*

Thor’s excitement carries him through the morning. It’s overcast when they head down to the village, but Thor wants the weather to match his mood, so with a thought he clears the clouds out until the blue sky peeks through and the sun makes a welcome appearance. The entire village is gathered in the square. People are packed tightly into the middle and spilling into the avenues and lanes that surround it. A murmur goes up when Thor and Loki arrive, and the crowd parts to let them through to the stage.

Thor has changed his outfit to festival clothing as well, in red and blue and silver with a one-shouldered cape, his hair tied back with a ribbon. The clothes are a breath of nostalgia and he feels more like himself than he has in ages; they’re a little piece of the past to help carry him into the future.

Loki stands behind Thor and to the left when they take the stage, and that’s a little piece of the past too, although Thor hopes to leave this one behind. They should stand side-by-side. He takes Loki’s wrist and pulls him forward, and the smile that Loki gives him warms him to his toes.

Thor usually hates public speaking, but somehow knowing that it’s the last time he’ll have to do it in this capacity makes it almost fun. He was only supposed to give a few opening words, but he finds himself waxing a little bit maudlin, and the thanks he gives everyone at the end is heartfelt. Loki caps the speech off by sending up a magical fireworks display. There are starbursts of every color, a glittering rainbow hanging in the sky. The shrieks of excited children make Thor grin.

The musicians start up afterwards, harp and flute and tambour. There’s a Maypole with colorful ribbons, and dancers, and children throwing flowers. Thor gets pulled into a dance with three laughing women. He sees Loki similarly engaged with a gaggle of children; Loki is creating sparkling illusions of animals to dance around in a circle with them and chase and nip playfully at the children’s heels, and the sound of their laughter is a cheerful counterpoint to the music.

There’s food afterward, and drink. Storytelling. Reminiscing. Laughter and tears both. Loki and Thor are never far apart but Thor finds his eyes seeking his brother when he’s not directly at his side. He finds Loki looking back at him more often than not. There is the promise of _later_ in the looks that pass between them, but for now it’s time to give of themselves to their people.

As goodbyes go, this is a sweet one.

In the late afternoon, when the light is golden and the shadows are deep, all the couples young and old that have found each other since Ragnarok gather in the square. They have on their finest clothes and widest smiles. Loki goes from couple to couple, saying a few words to each one and fastening their hands together with braided cords. One by one they come to Thor.

Odin used to do this back on Asgard. Couples would wait for a grand feast in order to be personally wed by the Allfather himself. Thor will never style himself such, but he does feel a certain parental affection for the people gathered before him with their hopeful eyes. His time with the gauntlet is dim and growing dimmer, but he knows that for a time he knew all of them intimately. Brought a good number of them back from the dead. Is the only reason they’re here today at all.

 _I’m more of an Allfather than Father ever was,_ Thor thinks.

He speaks words that he’s heard so often he memorized them centuries ago, binding together husband and wife. Wife and wife. Husband and husband. The first time two men approach him together he can’t help but look to Loki. He expects Loki to be looking back, but instead his eyes are carefully on the ground. He’s fidgeting. It makes Thor feel odd in his chest. The men exchange their rings and they kiss to the cheers of the assembled crowd, and then shake Thor’s hand afterwards. Thor grips their hands firmly, maybe harder than he should.

 _Love each other well_ , he thinks. _And passionately, and long._

He looks for Loki again. Doesn’t see him.

The sun has set by the time the ceremony is done, and the bonfires roar to life. Ale and mead flow like water. Someone shoves a cup of ale at Thor and he takes it, and then Valkyrie is there. She knocks her cup against his, and her eyes are kind.

“Isn’t it time for you to go, Your Majesty?” she says. 

“Trying to get rid of me?”

“We’ll get along fine without you.”

Thor finds himself unexpectedly choked up. “I know you will,” he manages. “They have you, after all.”

They both drain their cups, and then Thor pulls Valkyrie into a hug.

“Thank you for everything,” he says, and she punches him in the shoulder, smiling.

“Go on, get.”

Thor gives her one more squeeze before he goes to find Heimdall. The Watcher is staring into one of the fires, though what he’s seeing Thor doesn’t know.

“Thor,” he says without turning around.

“My friend,” Thor says. “I have something for you.”

He’s been thinking about this for awhile.

“I left Stormbreaker at my house,” Thor tells him. “You should contact Jane Foster. She’s been trying to make a Bifrost for over a decade, though she calls it an Einstein-Rosen bridge. I think you can probably use the axe as a power source for a larger-scale one so we can connect New Asgard to the cosmos again. We’re larger than Midgard can contain, I’m afraid.”

“Are you sure?” Heimdall asks him, his serious golden eyes coming to rest on Thor’s face. “Without it you’ll be at the mercy of your brother.”

Thor smiles with half his mouth. He’s sure, though he doesn’t know how Loki will feel about it. Loki gets angry at the strangest things. “I’m sure.”

They clasp forearms, and Thor pulls Heimdall into a back-slapping hug.

“Don’t let anything blow up while I’m gone,” Thor says. “That’s my speciality.”

Heimdall smiles. “I’ll try not to. Oh, and Thor...when you’re ready to find Sif, Vanaheim is a good place to start.”

When no one is looking, Heimdall gives him a nod and a nudge and Thor leaves the roar of the fires and the sound of merriment behind him to walk up into the bluffs.

He finds Loki there, as he’d hoped he would.

They stand for a moment side by side looking down into the village. They can see people dancing around the fires, the smoke swirling up into the night, but the figures are small and indistinguishable and the sounds of celebration are muted from this far away. Thor’s hand finds Loki’s.

“Why did you leave early?” Thor says.

“I’m not particularly fond of goodbyes,” Loki says. “Shocking, I know, as I seem to always be leaving.”

Thor remembers the odd feeling in his chest from earlier, and grips Loki’s hand tighter. “You’re not having second thoughts about coming away with me, are you?”

“No,” Loki says, but he sighs, and the odd feeling intensifies.

“Something is bothering you,” Thor says. He doesn’t let go of Loki’s hand. Part of him is terrified for a brief second that if he does, Loki will disappear. That maybe all of this has been a grand hallucination. That he’ll wake up somewhere else, sad and alone.

Loki sighs again and turns away from the village and toward the sea. He tugs his hand free of Thor’s grasp.

“What happens when you get tired of me?” Loki says to the waves.

“What?”

“You said that you want happiness, but that you don’t know how to find it. What happens when you realize that you’ll never find it in _my_ bed, of all places? I’m a wretched thing, and your brother besides. All I can do is drag you down.”

Thor can only blink for a moment. His mind flashes back over every interaction they’ve had since Loki returned, searching for any indication he may have given Loki that he’s unwanted in the slightest, and finding none he steps up behind Loki and slides his arms around his waist.

“What brought this on, brother?” Thor murmurs, pressing his cheek to Loki’s hair. “What foolish whim has taken hold of you tonight?”

Loki’s chest heaves with another sigh, and then he’s doing something with his hands, and he holds up one of the tiny chunks of Mjolnir. He must have taken it from the house.

“Every morning I’m going to wake up and be terrified that today will be the day I can’t pick this up,” Loki says. “And then you’ll realize the awful mistake you’ve made.”

Thor takes the piece from Loki’s hand with his flesh-and-blood arm and holds him tighter with the uru one. The one that Loki made for him.

“For most of my life I’ve lived with that same fear,” Thor says.

“Father’s legacy,” Loki says bitterly.

“Let’s throw it away,” Thor says. “Cast it into the sea. We don’t need it.” The metal bites into his palm as he closes his fist around it. So much time they’ve wasted trying to live up to other people’s expectations, when really the only ones they should have cared about were their own. He’s stepping away from Loki and towards the edge of the bluff, and Loki keeps hold of his uru hand, trailing a step behind him, and then Thor is raising his arm back, and, just like that, a tiny piece of their shared misery is sailing away into the black, never to be seen again. 

Loki blows out a long breath, and Thor turns to him.

“There,” Thor says. “One foolish whim down. Any more?”

Loki huffs out a sniffly laugh.

“I don’t deserve you,” he says.

“No one deserves anyone,” Thor says. “Love isn’t about that. Any more?”

Loki just looks at him, silver in the moonlight, and his eyes and the set of his brow say everything. Thor thinks of the way Loki avoided his gaze at the public handfasting. A wild thought takes him, and as soon as it does he feels the rightness of it. Death had not been able to separate them, and Thor will be damned if he’ll let life do it.

“Shall I bind myself to you, then?” Thor asks. “Shall I swear an oath? That I won’t leave your side, not as long as you’ll have me?” Before he can think too long on it, Thor drops to a knee in the grass and holds his hand out. Loki is staring at him, transfixed. “You once swore your undying fidelity to me, and now I do it to you. Loki, Prince of Asgard, Odinson...will you marry me?”

“Stop,” Loki says, his voice shaking slightly, and he pulls Thor to his feet. “We’re brothers, you can’t say such mad things.”

“Aye, brothers, and more than that.”

“We can’t,” Loki says softly. His eyes are shining, perhaps with tears he doesn’t want to shed.

“No one has to know,” Thor says. “We’ll make our vows here, with the earth and the sea as our witnesses.”

Loki looks up, not meeting Thor’s eyes. “The stars, too?”

“And the stars, too,” Thor agrees.

“You knew that I was swearing to you and not...him,” Loki says. He’s still looking away.

“I did.”

Loki puts his hand over his mouth and breathes raggedly. Thor gathers him into a hug and they stand like that for long minutes, Loki’s arms folded up against Thor’s chest, Thor’s arms wrapped all the way around his brother’s back.

“You’d really bind yourself to me like that?” Loki says finally. And then, without waiting for an answer, “We don’t even have any rings.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Loki whispers into Thor’s shoulder, the final sibilant drawn out.

A simple, uncomplicated joy lights in Thor’s chest. He draws Loki’s chin up and kisses him, feels Loki melt against him. It hasn’t yet ceased to amaze him, the way that Loki’s body yields to his touch, and he hopes that it never does. Loki’s hands slide up his chest, cup the back of his neck for a moment, and then his clever fingers are doing something to Thor’s hair.

“What—” Thor starts, and then the tail his hair had been tied in comes loose and it all falls down around his shoulders. Loki steps away, smiling, holding up the red ribbon that had been holding it back.

“Give me your hand,” Loki says.

Thor does, and Loki loops the ribbon around their clasped hands the way that he did all the couples in the square earlier. Thor realizes he’s smiling when Loki touches the apple of his cheek, and Loki is smiling too, wide and open, the uninhibited grin he so rarely shows and that Thor has seen more times this past week than he has in the past century.

Thor cups Loki’s face with his uru hand, thumbing at his cheekbone, and kisses him again, deeply. Loki’s lips are so sweet he doesn't think he'll ever tire of this.

“Thor,” Loki breathes, pulling back. “You’re not supposed to kiss your groom in the middle of the ceremony.”

“My mistake,” Thor says, the corners of his mouth still tugging upward. “I’ve never gotten married before, you see.”

Softly, Thor begins the words of the wedding vow. Loki joins in and they speak them together, and Thor feels the power of the ancient oath flowing through their bodies and down, into the ground to mingle with the roots and the sleepy burrowing things, and out, to the sea and the ceaseless crash of her fury, and up, past the clouds, to the stars and beyond. Loki is weeping openly by the end of it. Thor kisses the tears from his cheeks and blinks back his own. Thor tugs the ribbon free of their wrists and then Loki’s arms are tight, tight around him, and his around Loki, and they cling to each other with all the strength of their shared centuries, from babes in arms to closest friends, and bitterest rivals, and dearest loves.

“Where shall your Bifrost carry us to?” Loki asks when they finally part. His eyes have dried, and his old familiar smirk plays at his lips. “I think a rather lavish honeymoon is in order.”

Thor’s heart is unbearably full. “That’s for you to decide. I left my Bifrost with Heimdall. They need it more than we do.”

“What do you mean?”

Thor takes both of Loki’s hands. “You can be my Bifrost, brother. I’m at your mercy. Take us through your secret ways.”

Loki shakes his head, still smirking, though his eyes are full of wonder. “You _are_ mad,” he says. “Trusting yourself to the likes of me.”

“Possibly,” Thor allows. “But I’d rather be mad with you than sane without you.”

They share a long look before Loki’s face breaks out into a grin. He turns away, pulling Thor with him along the bluff. He looks back over his shoulder at Thor, this beautiful fey creature of moonlight and chaos who Thor loves more than anything else in the universe, and his eyes sparkle with mischief.

“Then let’s get started.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [some gorgeous artwork here](https://twitter.com/moopzies/status/1139015519913119745) by moopz for the last scene <3

**Author's Note:**

> come yell about thor, loki, and endgame with me at http://twitter.com/thunderingraven

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [还有星星为我们作证](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19179376) by [stevepancake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stevepancake/pseuds/stevepancake)
  * [And the stars, too (Japanese translation)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19338712) by [Asagi_translator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asagi_translator/pseuds/Asagi_translator)
  * [Sacred](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20115160) by [Drachenkinder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drachenkinder/pseuds/Drachenkinder)




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